fledged

Tuesday was an adventure morning to noon, and if this doesn't sound like adventure to you now, it will when you get to be 83.

Left early for Tyndall AFB, out 15th Street and around Tyndall Parkway through, though there's progress to clean up, renovate, rebuild, what was the storm's worst, I'll get there, but the grief returns and the fury, raging anger that still nine months on I do not understand and cannot explain. My best metaphor for helping myself continues to be the image of Alma Mater beaten, ravaged, raped, and left for dead; the power of Nature loosed by Nature's god. Often beautiful, some of its, her, His Acts, as insurance and law absurdly but nevertheless call Acts of God, are unforgiveable, even grounds for vengeance, if such were possible. As in Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung theologizing that the offering and crucifixion of Jesus Christ was divine penance for the horrors God allowed Satan to visit upon Job, who is all of us.

Big news yesterday is that the two osprey chicks fledged yesterday, Monday morning early. I didn't know it until I checked in mid morning and found an empty nest; so moved the red time line, which is good second by second for twelve hours, moved it back until I found first one then the other darting off into life and liberty and the pursuit of.

May they both beat the statistic that 50% of osprey do not survive the first twelve months; but then we'll never know.

Next, fairly soon, but not before the young ones can do their own fishing, the whole family will migrate south to wherever they go, and we'll not see them again. Unless, as seemed to happen earlier this season, a chick from a couple years ago came and stood in the nest beside the mother osprey for a bit, then flew on.

The young ones who migrate stay at their winter grounds over the next year, then may return to the area the following year and a year or two or three after that begin their own mating and nesting. Our present parent osprey couple have been coming here since 2003, according to the website, and returned each year.

Tuesday's adventure was on. Visit to the barber shop at TAFB BX. "Make it look neat" is my usual request after I sit down and the barber asks what I want. And since they like to have pleasant chit chat during the haircut, I add, "I've taken my ears out, so I won't be able to hear anything you say," which does the silencing job so I can semi-nap.

After, the BX. Out of martini ingredients, so bought replenishments, gin, vodka, olives. At six drops over the ice per martini, my green bottle of vermouth is sufficient for this life and the life to come. All this stuff should be kept in the reefer, but it's not out here at BP PCB because it's not my kitchen. Well, it isn't my kitchen back in 7H either, but I get away with it.

Commissary tour after the BX. Trying to improve my eating practices, I bought several cans of beans, Bush's, the commissary's own brand, and something Circle. Also bag of grapes and a box of my favorite, blueberries.

This would be as exciting a day's adventure to you as it is to me if you were my age, but never mind.

Leaving the Base, back across Dupont Bridge into Callaway and stop for lunch at Gary's Oyster Shack right at the curve on Tyndall Parkway. Dozen of Mother Nature's best. Gary stopped by our table to chat and I asked where the oysters were from. He said he gets them all from Apalachicola, but that his Apalachicola supplier gets them variously from Texas, Mobile, Pensacola, Louisiana. No matter, they were perfect; and, unlike the dozen I had at Reel Time Fishers on 22 the last time we were out that way: good, and genuine Apalachicola, but shells nor nothin' not hosed off before opening and serving muddy dirty.

T+

My last but main feature today is the article I read about the two Americas, neither side knowing nor understanding, but both hating, the other. Epiphanic: lots of lightbulbs coming on. A problem with the hate talk from the WH is that hate talk energizes the many sub-humans among us to violence. Anyway article copy and pasted below:

There's a sobering truth to Trump's racist tweets that we don't like to admit

Updated 7:42 PM EDT July 15, 2019

President Trump's critics may not like to admit it, but there's an element of truth in the racist tweets he sent this weekend.

Trump told four nonwhite Democratic congresswomen that they should "go back" to the "crime infested places" where they came from, even though three of the four were born in the US and the fourth is a naturalized citizen.

Critics pounced. But in some ways those four lawmakers -- Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley -- really do belong to another country.

In one America, people react with shock when a President issues vile racist tweets against women lawmakers. In the other America, people say nothing.

In one America, people speak out in protest after a President claims that African, Haitian, and Salvadoran immigrants come from "sh**hole" countries. In the other America, people nod in agreement.

In one America, people become outraged when administration officials snatch migrant children from their mothers' arms and detain them for weeks in filthy conditions with no repercussions. In the other America, people remain silent.

And in one America, people condemn a President for describing protestors alongside neo-Nazis as "very fine people." In the other America, people shrug.

Trump's tweets show a keen understanding of America

It's been said that Trump's comments about immigrants reveal that he really doesn't understand America. The US was built on the concept of a melting pot, and immigrants are making the nation stronger, some say.

But Trump's recent tweets could show that he understands America better than his critics realize.

These two Americas have long co-existed.

One is the country represented by the Statue of Liberty, and its invitation to poor and tired immigrants "yearning to breathe free."

The other is the one that virtually wiped out Native Americans, enslaved Africans, excluded Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century and put Japanese Americans in concentration camps.

From the rarified perch of the White House, Trump's racist tweets tap into the id of this other America.

And here's what's so frightening about this: It is not a big stretch to say that when a leader uses the kind of language that Trump uses against minorities, it may increase the chances of violence being used against them.

I recall what Mark Naison, a historian at Fordham University, told me after the Charlottesville violence in 2017 when talking about Trump's racial rhetoric.

He says most Americans don't realize how dangerous it is for a leader to talk about fellow citizens as if they're the enemy. But some people from other countries know.

Naison recalled a conversation he once had with some Trump supporters.

"I told these guys, 'You can't control this. You're playing with fire,'" Naison says. "Open violent communal warfare is scary. You can't control it. Look at what happened in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Israel."

The United States must become one thing or the other

Historical analogies, of course, are tricky.

I've heard commentators say we're on the verge of a second Civil War. That makes a mockery of the carnage of that war, where at least 600,000 Americans were killed.

Yet there is another 19th-century parallel that resonates. One commentator recently said we're on the brink of a "political civil war."

That comment evoked another era that reminds me of this one -- the decades running up to the Civil War.

Then, as now, we were splitting into two different countries. Political compromise was impossible on another issue that revolved around American identity -- slavery. Congressional lawmakers carried pistols on the House and Senate floors.

The impending Civil War was described as "irrepressible conflict" -- the nation would become either a slave-holding nation or a free-labor country. There was no middle ground.

That period also saw the rise of the nation's first anti-immigration party. They were called the "The American Party," otherwise known as the "Know-Nothings." They blamed Irish and German immigrants for rising crime and poverty rates, and riots erupted across America in the 1840s and '50s.

"Party members tended to come from the working classes and had a strong anti-elitist bent," Amy Briggs wrote in National Geographic. "Their platform sought to limit immigration and the influence of Catholicism, and they used ugly ethnic stereotypes to stir up hatred against the recent German and Irish arrivals."

Trump's tweets show we are now in the middle of another "irrepressible conflict." We can't forever be a country that prides itself for welcomingimmigrants and religious diversity while also being one that puts immigrant children in cages and shrugs when our President makes racist statements.

To paraphrase another President -- Abraham Lincoln -- we eventually "will become all one thing or all the other."

We can become what one scholar called a "compassionate, multireligious, multiracial democracy."

Or we can become what another called a "hollowed out" democracy, where one ethnic group rules the rest.

The outrage over Trump's tweets will eventually fade. But the choice his racial rhetoric presents to America will be with us for years to come.